Page:Emma Speed Sampson--The shorn lamb.djvu/94



The Hedges was a perfect specimen of colonial architecture, red brick with pillared portico and deep cornice of beautiful proportion and workmanship. Every detail had been carefully considered by the builder. The windows and doors were not mere holes in the walls but decorative spaces whose size, shape and position were of paramount importance to the architectural effect. The finished whole had been beautiful, but that beauty had largely disappeared through the vandalism of paint that generations of Bollings had imposed upon their ancestral home. The mellow pink of the old brick had been spared, but wherever there was wood, as in the cornice, blinds and pillars of the portico, paint had been applied recklessly. The crenelations of the cornice from successive coats had lost the clear cut decision that had made for beauty and were but indistinct rounded lumps. The indentations of the fluted columns of the portico had gradually been filled in.

The present owner of The Hedges had out-